Here is an excerpt from an article written by Alex “Sandy” Pentland for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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Like many people, I’ve encountered teams that are “clicking.” I’ve experienced the “buzz” of a group that’s blazing away with new ideas in a way that makes it seem they can read each others’ minds. We think of building teams that operate on this plane as an art, or even magic. It’s not something you can plan; it’s lightning-in-a-bottle stuff that you just embrace when you’re lucky enough to come across it.

But to me, the buzz was so palpable, I decided that it must be a real, observable and measurable thing. I was motivated to find a way to document that buzz, and understand good teamwork as a hard science.

The team I lead at MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory has done just that. Using wearable electronic sensors called sociometric badges, we capture how people communicate in real time, and not only can we determine the characteristics that make up great teams, but we can also describe those characteristics mathematically. What’s more, we’ve discovered that some things matter much less than you may suspect when building a great team. Getting the smartest people, for example.

My feature article in HBR‘s April Spotlight on teams describes in detail the new science of building great teams. We can summarize those points here. Our data show that great teams:

Communicate frequently. In a typical project team a dozen or so communication exchanges per working hour may turn out to be optimum; but more or less than that and team performance can decline.

Talk and listen in equal measure, equally among members. Lower performing teams have dominant members, teams within teams, and members who talk or listen but don’t do both.

Engage in frequent informal communication. The best teams spend about half their time communicating outside of formal meetings or as “asides” during team meetings, and increasing opportunities for informal communication tends to increase team performance.

Explore for ideas and information outside the group. The best teams periodically connect with many different outside sources and bring what they learn back to the team.

You’ll notice that none of the factors outlined above concern the substance of a team’s communication. As I said, our badges only capture how people communicate — tone of voice, gesticulation, how one faces others in the group, and how much people talk and listen. They do not capture what people communicate.

This is purposeful. From the beginning, I suspected that the ineffable buzz of high-performing teams wasn’t more about the how of communication than the what. My hypothesis was that the ancient biological patterns of signaling that humans developed in the millennia before we developed language — which is a relatively recent development — still dominate our communication. I was buoyed in this idea by research on just how sophisticated non-verbal communication can be across the animal kingdom. Bees, for example, use a marvelous system of dancing competitions to decide where to get their pollen.

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I invite you to follow the series of blog posts I will write on this topic for this Insight Center. We talk more about what the data has shown so far with regard to specific business trends, such as distance work. We will also talk about the power of visualization of the data, and where the technology and science are headed.

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This post is part of the HBR Insight Center on The Secrets of Great Teams. To read all of the article, please click here.

Alex “Sandy” Pentland is the director of MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory and the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program. To read more of his blog posts, please click here.